AIBU to think that the anti UPF books and diets around at the moment are just a new version of Clean Eating?

[TeaforTheWins]

Demonising all foods that have emulsifiers in and making us think that a “upf” free diet is realistic, to me, is madness. I eat well, I cook meals from scratch most of the time but of course I have “UPF” in my diet. A sandwich in my packed lunch made from supermarket bread, the odd tin of soup, biscuits with my tea, fruit yoghurts, a sandwich on the train, a supermarket croissant on a Sunday morning etc.
Am i not getting something? Or is this just another way to make women hate our bodies, hate ourselves for not having the time to be baking bread at home, and part with our hard earned money to buy artisan chocolate rather than the kit kat that we actually want.
I’ve read Ultra Processed People and I’ve listened to the podcasts, but I can’t see how this is at all realistic for working parents to live up to.

But, much like UPFs, it's not as simple as "this is bad so don't do it" as there are many complex socio-economic factors behind why people do it and making it an issue of virtue is a middle-class obsession as it entirely ignores the reasons why people will still do it despite knowing they shouldn't. As a PP said, it gives certain people something to feel superior about.

I'm "obsessed" with the concept of UPFs and I assure you the only people I demonise are the capitalist companies making billions of pounds from vulnerable people knowing full well the impact of what they're doing. Have you read the book? Done any reading into it? This is not a class war, it is a war on capitalism, governments should be doing more to reign in these companies ESPECIALLY in terms of marketing and ESPECIALLY in terms of young people.

I know full well why people are hooked on UPFs, it's a system that has been designed. It is going to be incredibly difficult to untangle, but I absolutely believe to the core of my being that this will be the scandal of our generation that will be studied for centuries. Call me superior all you want.

Regardless of what side of an argument you are on, presenting anecdotes like this as any kind of “proof” is not at all helpful. My grandfather smoked for sixty five years and died at a ripe old age of a non-smoking related cause. This is not evidence that smoking is not harmful.

I don't have the time, energy or money to bother about it
I do cook from scratch mostly but I also eat crisps, chicken nuggets, gravy granules, mayo etc. Some days I just about manage cereal and a banana for my evening meal

I fully expect UPFs to be the tobacco of the future.

People are going to be horrified at how it was considered acceptable to eat them in excess, just like it was once acceptable to smoke.

I don’t disagree. But then the argument that eating low processed food and cooking at home is expensive is not valid.
My grandmother would eat cooked potatoes and kefir (homemade, made from the cheapest milk) as the main meal when times were tough and she was on a tight budget. A meal like that is significantly cheaper than a ready-made meal followed by snacks.

Your tastes and cravings adapt to your diet.

Most food habits are self-perpetuating.

If you’re not in the habit of eating processed foods you don’t tend to crave them or find them appetising.

Also, cheap chocolate tastes crap and unsatisfying and burns your throat if you’re used to eating nice food.

On the other hand if you eat stuff like doritos and creme eggs a lot, tofu and veg probably taste really bland.

The book doesn't advocate or say its realistic to quit UPF.

Its more of an expose of the food system which is messed up.

What's needed are affordable alternatives. Decent bread for example that is affordable. British bread is fucking embarrassing.

YANBU that it's unrealistic for working parents, because that's partly why this shit was invented. I personally choose no kids and plenty of cooking and baking using many home-grown or foraged ingredients, because I have time. 😊

Genuine question, but is there anyone here who HAS read Ultra Processed People who thinks the issue is blown up or some misguided middle class virtue signalling at best, or money making at worst? Because I've genuinely not come across a single person who HAS read the book who has taken that view?

It seems to me it's the people who are feeling frustrated by the inconvenient truth and it all comes across a bit Trump vs climate change. Denying the facts.

I very much believe that the reason poverty and obesity are linked is not necessarily to do with costs.

I feel like many poorer people are often bored and or miserable. Not always but more likely to be. Food is an affordable, socially acceptable and available dopamine hit.

Oh for god's sake, it's got nothing to do with women at all, it's for anyone!

The crap they put in all kinds of food is very worrying. Hardly any food doesn't contain additional chemicals and additives now.

It's not about weight, it's about health.

It's fact. The industry is profit driven and the food we eat is poor quality. It's nothing to do with hating yourself, quite the opposite actually. If you love yourself, you want to stay healthy and invest in your future self.

I have three kids so time is sparce. We still have UPF but much less. For us, in this point in our family's life, it's about doing what we can with a view that when time allows in the future, we'll continue to improve our diet.

Some change is better than none.

It's the constant reference to THE BOOK that annoys me, like it's the gospel of all food knowledge. The word of Chris.

I don't think anyone is saying that this is a good thing.

They're saying it's an adaptation (seek high calorie foods and store fat in case of famine) which has now become maladaptive.

You see examples of this all the time in nature as well - butterflies which were light coloured became highly visible to birds against soot coloured buildings so a greyer variant became more populous.

The problem is if the maladaptation doesn't do you much harm until after you've reproduced then there's no evolutionary drive to change.

Anyway, I digress. I think the key thing here is recognising that evolutionary drives are exceptionally strong so if we were asking people to overcome them, particularly in the face of the massive weight of capitalism's advertising/precision design to make things tempting, then we should regulate the industries to try and enable people to eat well without it being purely an exercise in "willpower".

I think the key thing here is recognising that evolutionary drives are exceptionally strong so if we were asking people to overcome them, particularly in the face of the massive weight of capitalism's advertising/precision design to make things tempting, then we should regulate the industries to try and enable people to eat well without it being purely an exercise in "willpower".

Absolutely fair. We need regulation, though I don't know much about how to achieve that. Jamie Oliver did try but became even more unpopular!

Yep.

I really don't get the argument that UPF's are cheaper than food made from scratch. If I was buying bags of Doritos, bars of chocolate, jars of sauce, gluten free bread (I'm coeliac and so is one child), cereals, microwave meals, etc., I'd be spending a sodding fortune.

As it is I just buy seasonal veg, fish (which people say is expensive, but it doesn't work out that way if you're not buying vats of fizzy drinks), beans and pulses, so on and so forth. I batch cook once a week which takes me maybe four hours with help from DH, and we get the kids involved (they love it and it's teaching good skills). Even if I'm preparing a meal from scratch mid-week it doesn't take longer than 40 minutes at a push. We both work full time jobs.

Baking bread is easy. We're not big snackers here, but there's fruit, nuts, homemade hummus available. We bake scones and things too.

I grew up with my Dad making meals from scratch every night. Eating out consisted of going to the chippy on occasion, not visiting McDonalds or KFC for breakfast several times a week, or Starbucks for the equivalent of a meal in one single coffee plus a panini.

It's weird to me how UPF and fast food is seen as the norm, and there's this message that preparing your own food costs an extortionate amount and takes loads of time. It's nonsense.

Then we are not talking about poor people, we are talking about low income Americans and Brits who by international standards of being poor at under 2 dollars a day are still doing well enough to be able to afford snacks, sweets and alcohol.

It's the constant reference to THE BOOK that annoys me, like it's the gospel of all food knowledge. The word of Chris.

Look I do get that I really do, lol, but it's a concept that has only started being widely recognised since 2017 so there isn't a lot out there on the topic, and the book frankly is bloody eye opening. And if you're trying to express an opinion on the topic and haven't read it, quite frankly, the opinion is pretty irrelevant because it will be so wildly uninformed unless you've somehow delved into the depths of scientific journals, which frankly, still do not cover the political and social elements the book does.

And there hasn't been anything credible written to discredit it either, that's the key thing, guess who funds the people who have tried?

But its not, because its not cutting out any food groups whatsoever. Nobody is telling you you can't eat meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, dairy, starches. Its literally just recommending you don't do much to it?
Its not even that hard or time consuming.... Buy a raw chicken, and roast it, you can add potatoes and vegetables into the same tray to roast in the fat of the chicken.... Nothing processed. Whats restrictive about that

I don’t think it’s a fad. I think it’s honesty about how bad our diets have become in the last 40 year and what happens to our bodies when the majority of our food is heavily processed.

Brazil was ahead on this.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-brazil-carlos-monteiro

When you add sugar, salt or fat in your kitchen you’re aware of how much is going into your body. You know that cookies have sugar and fried chicken is high in fat. When your breakfast is a ‘healthy’ cereal you’re often eating added sugar. When your use a vegetable pasta sauce the added sugar and salt is often high but you still think you’re making a healthy choice. All the crap marketed as healthy snacks for small children because it ‘comes from fruit’ even though it’s so highly processed that their bodies don’t react to it the same way.

Companies are making millions by selling us food that doesn’t keep us full and keeps us snacking and our blood sugar yo-yoing.

In 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising its citizens to avoid UPFs outright. The country was acting out of a sense of urgency, because the number of young Brazilian adults with obesity had risen so far and so fast, more than doubling between 2002 and 2013 (from 7.5% of the population to 17.5%). These radical new guidelines urged Brazilians to avoid snacking, and to make time for wholesome food in their lives, to eat regular meals in company when possible, to learn how to cook and to teach children to be “wary of all forms of food advertising”.
The biggest departure in the Brazilian guidelines was to treat food processing as the single most important issue in public health. This new set of rules framed unhealthy food less in terms of the nutrients it contains (fats, carbohydrates etc) and more by the degree to which it is processed (preserved, emulsified, sweetened etc). No government diet guidelines had ever categorised foods this way before. One of the first rules in the Brazilian guidelines was to “avoid consumption of ultra-processed products”. They condemned at a stroke not just fast foods or sugary snacks, but also many foods which have been reformulated to seem health-giving, from “lite” margarines to vitamin-fortified breakfast cereals.

But they weren't suggesting cutting it out entirely, but reducing it to 20% (which at a fifth is a generous allocation)

I personally think it's great that this is being brought to light, and encouraging us to look at labels more. The more we do this, the more supermarkets will remove unnecessary chemicals and make better value UPF free versions. I'm noticing it already.

For example, peanut butter - a couple of years ago the only option for UPF free peanut butter were the expensive 'health food' brands like pip etc, but because more people started buying it, now Sainsburys and Tesco both have own brand versions of 100% peanut butter which is much cheaper.

Looking for 'for' or 'against' an entire book is pretty simplistic when it comes to academic research.

What a response!
In my op I didn’t say that Doritos and a cream egg should REPLACE a home cooked dinner, I stated that these UPF foods forming part of our diet shouldn’t be demonised, and mothers shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for using shop bought bread in an otherwise homemade sandwich in their child’s lunch box.
It is also a privilege to be able to buy fresh food and ingredients, CVT states this very clearly in his book and every podcast that he does.
I really feel very sad that there are people out there who think that poverty is born out of laziness as one poster said.
Would a more balanced view of what we eat be more helpful? Rather than going to the extremes: “A diet that includes UPF means that people are eating Crisps and Chocolate for breakfast, chicken nuggets for lunch and a frozen pizza for dinner” OR “I only eat fresh, seasonal, local foods that I cook from scratch at home, I make my own yoghurt before bed and I spend my evenings batch cooking sourdough and fermenting cabbage” ? Why does it have to be so final?
A fruit yogurt after a lentil lasagna for dinner, supermarket bread to make a tuna and cucumber sandwich for lunch, banana and a digestive biscuit with your coffee in the morning etc.
It might be difficult to hear, but there really are people who don’t have time to make bread, and there really are people who can’t make fresh meals from scratch every night. That’s the reality unfortunately.
I feel it is so similar to the Clean Eating movement which was laced with “facts” and “research” which made many people feel disordered around food.
Oh, and these men really are making a fortune out of this new diet.